Owner/CEO's Name & Business's Name
Salah Boukadoum, Founder of Soap Hope
Year Established
2009
Current Year Revenue (Optional - please include year)
$66,000
Next Year's Projected Revenue (Optional - include year)
$875,000
Why is your business unique and what's your pitch?
Soap Hope invests 100% of profits - every dollar - into sustainable anti-poverty initiatives. We sell premium all natural body care products on our site. Our profits are loaned each year, interest free, to non-profit partners who use them to provide capital and business training to women in poverty around the world through microfinance. We carry only the highest quality brands on our site and all our products are researched for all-natural purity. We also minimize our environmental impacts by packing our orders in reused clean cardboard, known as our "Ugly Box."
What led you to start the business?
Soap Hope's founders are seasoned entrepreneurs who have started, grown and sold businesses in the past. We grew our last company, a technology startup, to $10 million in revenue and sold it in 2005. We decided to apply our business skills to work on global social problems. We developed our unique business model, Good Returns, to create a new paradigm for businesses to engage in social good through partnership with sustainable non-profits. We launched Soap Hope in December of 2009 to prove that the Good Returns model works. My personal goal is to teach 1,000 entrepreneurs how to implement Good Returns in their own businesses, and thereby generate one billion dollars for sustainable social causes.
Lessons Learned
- A social enterprise must compete as vigorously as any other business - customers will reward you for your social mission, but only if your service and pricing are as good as your traditional-model competitors.
- Integrating a social mission will create many powerful opportunities to raise awareness of the business, through traditional media, partnership with non-profits, social networks, and vendor partnerships.
- A social mission will create fierce loyalty from employees and customers. It's not just good for the world; it's good for business.